Paper Trail Urged as E-Voting Fix

Efforts to secure the integrity of electronic-voting machines seemed to get a boost this week, but the debate over the best way to guard against election tampering remained at a fever pitch.

After five months of hearings and deliberations, a high-level election-reform commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker recommended that Congress require electronic-voting machines to produce a voter-verifiable paper audit trail by 2008.

But even while the Commission on Federal Election Reform expressed support for paper trails, it acknowledged that they might not be the best solution to address security concerns with e-voting machines. The commission urged researchers to develop new technologies that could resolve the issues more effectively.

The voter-verifiable paper audit trail, or VVPAT, is a printout of the machine's electronic ballot that voters can examine after they make their selections on the machine. The paper would scroll behind a glass partition, allowing voters to reject the ballot before casting it. Election officials would use the paper to audit machines and conduct recounts.

"The deliberations of the commission were focused on the need for voting equipment to ... have a voter-verifiable record generated independently of the machine tally and that is available for recounts and audit," he said. "And looking at the technology that's available today, the voter paper trail met those criteria."

Few states are waiting for Congress to act on the paper-trail issue. Twenty-six states have already passed paper-trail legislation of their own, and another 14 are considering it, according to VerifiedVoting.org, which has led the movement for paper-trail laws.

But questions about the paper trails remain, in part because the question of how states implement them is as important as whether they implement them at all.

For example, someone determined to tamper with an election could program e-voting machines to record one vote on paper and a different vote inside the machine. Therefore paper trails are meaningless if officials don't conduct post-election audits to compare at least 1 percent of paper votes against their electronic counterparts.

The commission, organized by American University's Center for Democracy and Election Management, recognized this problem and recommended that states perform audits. But the commission balked at asking Congress to mandate them.

Opponents of paper trails, many election officials among them, raise other questions that the commission did not address. They're adamant that few voters will actually look at the paper record, negating its usefulness. During a test of paper trails last year in Nevada's primary and presidential elections, election observers estimated that fewer than 30 percent of voters bothered to examine the hard copy.

Critics also say the printers will jam, break down or run out of paper, creating more labor for poll workers. And they argue that an election involving numerous races and candidates would produce an unwieldy paper trail that would be time-consuming for voters to review and difficult for election officials to recount -- especially if the thermal paper used in the printers is tightly curled.